PayPal building casual dev tools

PayPal, the online payments firm, is launching new developer tools designed to streamline social games transactions. This will be followed by a micropayments feature next month.

Speaking to Inside Facebook, PayPal VP of product development Osama Bedier outlined the project’s aims.

"We’re going to have an online shopping experience where you can authorize a transaction on the screen right there in the game," he said.

"Right now, if I’m playing a game, I have to leave the flow, go to a different web site, authenticate myself, authorize a payment and then come back to the game."

The upcoming micropayments feature will allow gamers to pay smaller top-up fees in games instead of larger, one-time payments.

"What I expect is to have the experience of ‘I want that virtual tractor’, then I click on it and it automatically pulls from my account," Bedier said.

“It will be like how long-distance phone calls are billed. It gets tallied up and you get billed at some normal interval. It takes all the friction out, allowing you to just enjoy the game."

The firm is currently testing both development tool and micropayments feature with several studios, with plans to launch them at the Innovate Conference in San Francisco in October.